On the second Sunday of this month, middle-class, urban Indians added another festival to their already long list of celebrations spread all through the year. Mother's Day is a fresh import, less than a decade old, but it seems almost normal for Indians eager to embrace global traditions, to adopt something like a special day for mothers they have venerated for millennia.
Most Indians who would have bought, or more likely ordered via the Internet a gift for their mothers as an expression of their gratitude and love, would perhaps not have paid any thought to the origin of this tradition and its transformation from pagan and spiritual origins to a marketing opportunity.
From pagan to pacifism…
The idea of celebrating mothers goes back to ancient Egyptians who held an annual festival, usually in spring to celebrate goddess Isis, mother of the Pharaohs; in Greece it was Rhea, mother of Greek deities, most notably Zeus. Early Christians rejoiced on Mother Mary's birth anniversary, a practice that found resonance in England in Mothering Sunday, celebrated on the fourth Sunday of Lent.
The practice died down in the nineteenth century, but surprisingly in America took a secular turn.
Julia Ward Howe, writer-author of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, America's most popular patriotic song, was appalled by the Civil War's carnage, its toll of human lives. She discovered pacifism. For the rest of her life she would exhort mothers to come together to protest all wars, the death of their sons at the hands of sons of other mothers; she even proposed that July 4{+t}{+h}, American Independence Day be re-christened Mother's Day.
That was in 1870; another day was chosen to commemorate mothers, and for ten years the hardy pacifist funded the celebration of Mother's Day, in many cities, as a rallying call for peace; soon it dried up when she passed on.
What is important to note so far is the idea of motherhood as the potent weapon for peace underlying the festivities; between the worship of Isis and Rhea to Howe's concept of Mother's Day a common thread tied both the pagan/religious and the secular in a stirring motif: mothers as embodiments of motherhood, a transformative force for a better world.
…To a commodity
It was after the Second World War that Mother's Day acquired its modern form and content by springing loose from its communitarian and social inspiration. At the hands of a resurgent post-World Ear capitalism and the managerial revolution, Mother's Day was on its way into a profound transformation symptomatic of our times: a window of opportunity for marketing and for redefining our self-perceptions.
Mothers' Day as we know it is marketed as an occasion to remember that we all have mothers and that the best way to do that is to buy them something. It is an occasion for shopping, to allow money to play what the great nineteenth century philosopher termed the “the agent of inversion”. On Mother's Day, the last and most poignant and stirring bond in human beings, between the mother and her offspring, becomes a commodity.
The separation of the act of commemoration from its reason for existence is now almost universal, afflicting an increasing number of remembrance days with meaningless gestures.
What does Mother's Day have in common with Earth Day, Children's Day Innovation Day, Gandhi Jayanthi, National Technology Day, World Blind Day even Independence Day — but not the Palestinians' Land Day?
Each one of these owes its origins to a socially felt need for change in the existing order. Earth Day is meant to draw our attention to the havoc wrought on the planet; Innovation Day to the immense possibility of translating human creativity into goods and services for a more sustainable world. But in an age of the metaphor and powerful signs as symbols, the context loses its value as the binding agent, the cause perpetually in need of re-affirmation; the sign takes over. Soon, gesture is all that matters and what better time to showcase the gesture than on the anointed day of commemoration?
The gesture as meaning
On Innovation Day, companies hold seminars on product possibilities, policymakers give away prizes for products no one will give a second glance; on Earth Day, the brief emotional outburst of bonding with a scoured earth is trivialised by the rapidity and indifference with which natural resources are sacrificed for development.
What happens is a gradual de-contextualisation of the symbol; bereft of a renewable social and defining purpose, the symbol, Earth Day or Mother's Day remains in need of a new meaning, a new sense of affirmation.
That is provided by marketing and mediating agencies, chiefly television and the Internet.
Fractured vision
One of the chief reasons for the supremacy of the gesture (Gandhi topi on Bapu's birthday or Greenpeace T-shirts) is our complete acceptance of the antinomies prevalent in the dominant Western discourse, the division between science and religion, between man and woman, between Nature and innovation, and between us and Mahatma Gandhi. With a fractured vision of the world middle class Indians, like their counterparts elsewhere, have allowed their focus on crises (gender inequality, mothers, earth, innovation or even ourselves) to be reordered by marketers of consumerism.
Both fracture and re-assembly turn the commemorative act into a commodity whose value can be estimated. The National Retail Federation estimates that this year Americans will spend an average of $152 on their moms, an 18 per cent jump over the previous year; the total will be around $18 billion benefiting the flower industry, digital shopping sites and restaurants.
In the Palestine, millions protest against Israeli occupation on Land Day. It's just another day, like everyday.